Do I really need it? I know I want it...

Over the weekend I got to experience yet again how awesome DSLR's are. A friend of mine had quite an amazing example of one, with a beautiful telephoto lens and what can I say but... I WANT IT! (as the inner child in me would put it) So now on the budget of someone in college with no job, who needs to buy all new oil painting supplies (reason being...well a story for another day) on top of needing enough money to get through the two ceramics studios I'm taking, I want to get a DSLR... Now I'm not a photo student or anything, but honestly a nice camera would do me good. Not to say that I don't enjoy my little cybershot, but well...it's a piece of crap! It's fine for vacation goers who want to record in no specific detail their vacations to wonderful far off places, but I want to record my work! I want to record life around me as I see it, and the way I think it should be seen! And even though I don't consider myself to be a photographer as an artist getting images for what inspires me is one of the most useful tools. Who knows maybe with this wonderful camera I will become the next Anselm Adams! Okay my speech for my parents is now done...hopefully I will convince (but likely not seeing as the cheapest I've seen used is like $300 and the one I've found that I want is like $560...not gonna happen; oh well now where is my rich husband when I need him...wait I don't have one...)

Letchworth State Park

Letchworth State Park is such a beautiful place! All these pictures where taken on a trip with a Rochester photo group and boy was it a beautiful day. I was using a Canon Power-shot and although they where good pictures most of them I touched up in photoshop. I always feel guilty using photoshop to edit images because I feel that if you are showing them just as the image its self that you should have just taken an amazing photo to begin with. Not that that is so easy to do, which is where I think the line is drawn between amateurs and professionals; somehow I feel these days there are more professional amateurs than professional professionals. That is people with really nice cameras taking "nice" pictures and editing the crap out of them until they look professional. Maybe I just don't know enough about photography, but perhaps with all those expensive camera's out there if you're willing to pay that much for one you just get to slap a "I'm a Photographer, and I always take awesome pictures with my awesome camera" sticker on your chest so everyone knows to "OOoohhh" and "Ahhhhhh" at your pictures. ANYWAYS...I've done exactly what I hate most about photography today and edited most of these using tools like "exposure", "brightness/contrast" and "selective color" on photoshop. So maybe these days the real photographers and artists are the people who scripted Photoshop. That being said...these images brought to you by Photoshop personnel in the hands of an amateur photographer.

Eastman House

The Eastman House is really a place to see in Rochester. Not only does it have a photo-gallery attached to it, but the house its self is gorgeous. I took these pictures a number of years ago during summer, when all the flowers were in bloom and everything was green and...there where people EVERYWHERE! You can't really tell but for most of these pictures I had to wait for people to disappear behind pillars, around trees etc... because there was almost always someone blocking my view! In some of the pictures I think you can see an elbow or two ;)

Sailing Away

I sail with GYC out of irondequoit bay, so naturally at some point I was going to take pictures of sail boats. I really love this set of images, even though I think they are a little bit on the common side; So when I inevitably started playing with them in Photoshop I really focused on the color of the image. My goal was to bring out a specific color palette in each image that I thought would compliment it best.

It's in the Sky